This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If you participate in life, you don?t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubbornness in denying that maxim.
One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
Will |
One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.
Better | Fear | Relationship | Will | World |
She's gasping for love like a carp on a kitchen table gasping for water.
Will |
So from now on the days were going to continue one after the other like this, always the same, innumerable, bringing nothing!... It was God's will. The future was a pitch-black tunnel, ending in a locked door. She gave up her music: why should she play? Who was there to listen?... She left her drawing books and her embroidery in a closet. What was the use of anything? What was the use?
There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries; one crosses them like bridges and keeps going.
Time |
The primacy of faith was followed by the "primacy of charity." ... But paradoxically, at the same time this was also partially responsible for the fact that for some the relationship with God was obscured and became difficult to live out and understand. Today, due partly perhaps to such impasses, the perspective of a new primacy seems to be emerging - that of hope, which liberates history because of its openness to the God who is to come.
Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra
For me to rehearse with a children's orchestra a Mahler symphony was to really work. We had three or four weeks of rehearsal with the orchestra, every day eight or nine hours, putting the First together. I had been conducting Tchaikovsky a lot and Beethoven, but Mahler was different.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
How far the gentlemen of dark complexion will get with their independence, now that they have declared it, I don?t know. There are serious difficulties in their way. The vast majority of people of their race are but two or three inches removed from gorillas: it will be a sheer impossibility, for a long, long while, to interest them in anything above pork-chops and bootleg gin.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
If Wall Street really wants to dispose of John L. Lewis, let it invite him to a swell feed, hand him a fifty-cent cigar with a torpedo in it, and so burn off his eyebrows.
There was an air of indifference about them, a calm produced by the gratification of every passion; and through their manners were suave, one could sense beneath them that special brutality which comes from the habit of breaking down half-hearted resistances that keep one fit and tickle one?s vanity?the handling of blooded horses, the pursuit of loose women.
Day | Fate | God | Hate | Life | Life | Nothing | Fate | God |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against change... The progress of humanity, far from being the result of government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face if its constant and bitter opposition.
Will |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
I read the other day a book defending the Ten Commandments. The best of all arguments for them, however, was omitted. It is that there are not forty of them.